Developer Update 2020/10/18

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Hello there Celeste players! We are back again with another Developer Update blog.

Here, we are going to spotlight a few of the important changes that are included in this patch, alongside some updates about the Halloween Event, and a small little surprise for you in the end!

Advisor Reworks - Set 2
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You can find the complete details of the changes to Advisors in their own dedicated blog post HERE.

Legendary Quests' AI Gear
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Thanks to Kire, the enemy units in Legendary Quests will now look considerably more visually pleasing. Don't get intimated by the new looks, though! These new helmets will change absolutely nothing in these units' stats, so Quest difficulty is completely unchanged by this improvement.

Bugfixes and Minor Changes
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You can see the list of bugfixes in the server maintenance blog post as well, but for your convenience, here's the list one more time:

• Various improvements to the Spanish, German, French and Italian versions of the game
• Fixed an issue where Babylonian War Chariots would do friendly fire when using Chariot Rider Sargon
  
• Fixed an issue where Babylonian Siege Towers would do friendly fire when they had units garrisoned inside.
  
• [Invasion of Verona]: More map exploit fixes added.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed garrisoned units to be ejected over cliffs.
  
• Ra's Bow of the Solstice has been buffed to grant +11.9% movement speed, from +6.2%. This affects existing bows.
  
• Fixed an issue where Sword of Tiberius and Robes of Babylon couldn't be traded after being crafted. This affects existing crafted items as well as future ones.
  
• All Palintonons now deal the same amount of bonus damage vs buildings. (2.5x)

Update on the Halloween Event
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This year's Halloween Event is going to be the most content-packed of them all! Have a sneak peek at the new stuff we've added this year below:

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More details about these items will be revealed with the Halloween Event's announcement blog, which is due in a few days.

A Nice Surprise!
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As our new server engineer @martinmine gets more comfortable with the server code, we are once again looking at our older plans and the things we have had on hold. We are happy to tell you that the lottery is once again in active development and will be added to the game soon!

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As Bahram would say, By Hourmazd!

All current and future content will stay 100% free and accessible to everyone.

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Thank you so much for reading, and we will see you all next time!

Project Celeste Development Team

What do you think about this week's blog? What would you like to see next? Let us know in the comments below!

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Missed the Roman Civilization's announcement? Find out about it HERE.

Project Celeste is completely free and always will be. However, we gladly accept donations for our overhead costs, which are larger than we have budgeted. If you want to support us, you can do so HERE.

Read every Romans related blog HERE.

Tell your friends! Join our Discord HERE.
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Another idea for increasing the amount of coin exiting circulation could be increasing GM slots to 20. GM fees are underappreciated when it comes to finding coin sink solutions.

I am skeptical that Global Market fees would be paid at quite the scale we are talking about. To give you some perspective, in the last 30 days, the Top 1000 richest players increased their total holdings by more than 77.5 million coins. That's just the increase in coins of anyone with at least about 441k coins in their wallet. It doesnt count the thousands and thousands of accounts below that level.

We hope to make changes to the Global Market (and its fee structure) to improve things, but I believe we will need a lot more to fight inflation.

 

I understand that many players are skeptical of the lottery. Please be aware that we spent an awful lot of time scrutinizing the game before deciding to add the lottery. It's a ton of work to build this program and we have always been well aware that some players would resist it, argue that we are straying too far from the game, etc.

Please know that we didn' t just casually decide to do this. The lottery is designed to attack something that has been plaguing the game and that continues to get worse all the time -- the inflation of prices of goods on the market that make engaging with the game increasingly difficult for new players.

The lottery is our very good faith attempt to combat this inflation. It is designed to remove lots of coins from circulation. The Lottery may not be the best way to do this. But is the best idea we have. Though many people have complained about the Lottery, I have not heard any better ideas out there.

Again, our point is to use the Lottery to combat inflation. If the Lottery fails to do this, or if some better idea emerges, we will eagerly make adjustments and continue to work to make the AoEO economy as successful as possible.

 

Fear not. The lotto items will not be completely out of reach for anyone. Some items are harder to get than others. While lotto items may be among the hardest to get, there is no gear that will be a requirement to beat any legendary quests, or anything like that. Longevity is what keeps players invested. Not everything has to be easy.

 

Clearly not much thought has been put into this and it's terrible to see precious dev time being wasted on such a corrupt mechanism. The lotto is not an attack to inflation but an attack to the game itself. it's like someone wanting to lose weight and you ask them to chop off a leg; that's how much thought has been put into this.
There's a player that beat vok when everyone thought it was impossible, another player soloed all legs with 1 civ, someone else manages to micro well enough and not lose any units. You are telling these players that they cannot have an item but that some random person will on the flip of the coin? What is this age of casino online? The lotto is a mockery to the game's most devoted players and to the idea that all you have to do is learn and play the game.
You don't want to cater to players who love to play the game but instead cater to some moes coin clicker, some farmer, who let's face it will be among the first to abuse the game, farm events and bug quests, beacuse by definition they enjoy getting stuff without playing the game. And this is the idea you will be reinforcing with the lotto.
How do you think players will feel about someone who won an item like that? Frustration and justifiable jealousy is the only answer.
A lottery in age of empires is unheard of. This is not a good faith attempt; it's using people's hopes to get an item against them. It would be way more honest to just take people's coin and tell them it's for the best of the game. Better yet, keep thinking, there are plenty of solutions for gradula and slow fixes. Effect will not be as fast but hey, you don't lose a leg in the process.
"longevity is what keep player invested" Invested in what? buying lotto tickets and hoping for the best?

 

I would like to see the lead devs comments on this. Frankly it seems like a couple people's side project, completely out of line with everything else done so far that has brought value to the game.
To me getting items in a fair way based on your effort is super important and I would never want to have some social experiment with the game's economy ruin that.

 

Finishedblock, I am not sure how you are used to being spoken to, but I am not used to being told I am corrupt or acting in bad faith. We are doing our absolute damnedest in good faith to help the game. For the umpteenth time, rather than flaming this place up, please suggest some better way to solve inflation.

 

I think the wealth divide continues to grow quite simply because there are players that can repeatedly do leg quests (and get those rewards that they can sell for high coin) and there are the other players that struggle with leg quests and are more comfortable with normal / elite quests which very rarely reward anything worthwhile.
Usually green gear or other vendor fodder.

Perhaps some middle ground is needed. The now 3 tiers of difficulty get changed to 4 tiers:
Normal quests > Normal quests (Elite mode) > Leg quests > Leg quests (Elite mode)
or maybe a difficulty setting for leg quests gets added: Moderate > Hard > Impossible.

I also see that gear value has become very polarized i.e. it's either worth lots.. 50K & up or it is low value 1K ish / vendor. Not sure of the answer here, maybe a +/- 10% spread on stats instead of the current 5% ?

Some ideas for coin sink.
1) Improve Moes rewards: I'd suggest many players have spent a few 100k at Moes to gain only a few rare gear 270c vendor items. The end result: they consider it a total waste & no longer visit Moes.
What percentage of players regularly use Moes?

2) Revise GM fees: Set a listing fee as a percentage of the asking price instead of the low vendor price.
Sell or not, the listing fee is coin out of circulation.
This should also stop items being listed at ridiculously high prices - If it doesn't sell listing fee is a total loss.

3) Perhaps add some cost for doing a quest: Ammunition's used, renewing the cavalry shoes, broken spear replacement etc. It's amazing really that the one set of Athena's arrows I bought some 3 years ago and which get fired many times every quest are still going strong. Wonderful value weren't they!

Maybe a munitions stock percentage is introduced & some defined stock level needs to exist before you are able to do a quest. This level goes down after each quest & is topped up by a purchase from a game store.

 

I think the wealth divide continues to grow quite simply because there are players that can repeatedly do leg quests (and get those rewards that they can sell for high coin) and there are the other players that struggle with leg quests and are more comfortable with normal / elite quests which very rarely reward anything worthwhile.
Usually green gear or other vendor fodder.

Perhaps some middle ground is needed. The now 3 tiers of difficulty get changed to 4 tiers:
Normal quests > Normal quests (Elite mode) > Leg quests > Leg quests (Elite mode)
or maybe a difficulty setting for leg quests gets added: Moderate > Hard > Impossible.

I also see that gear value has become very polarized i.e. it's either worth lots.. 50K & up or it is low value 1K ish / vendor. Not sure of the answer here, maybe a +/- 10% spread on stats instead of the current 5% ?

Some ideas for coin sink.
1) Improve Moes rewards: I'd suggest many players have spent a few 100k at Moes to gain only a few rare gear 270c vendor items. The end result: they consider it a total waste & no longer visit Moes.
What percentage of players regularly use Moes?

2) Revise GM fees: Set a listing fee as a percentage of the asking price instead of the low vendor price.
Sell or not, the listing fee is coin out of circulation.
This should also stop items being listed at ridiculously high prices - If it doesn't sell listing fee is a total loss.

3) Perhaps add some cost for doing a quest: Ammunition's used, renewing the cavalry shoes, broken spear replacement etc. It's amazing really that the one set of Athena's arrows I bought some 3 years ago and which get fired many times every quest are still going strong. Wonderful value weren't they!

Maybe a munitions stock percentage is introduced & some defined stock level needs to exist before you are able to do a quest. This level goes down after each quest & is topped up by a purchase from a game store.

Some good suggestions.
1. We have been working on improvements to Moes along the lines of what you are suggesting. Some real cool stuff in the future, keep your eyes peeled.
2. Spot on. I've been suggesting basing the listing deposit off of asking price. Afaik this is still somthing we are working out.
3. We have talked about some quests based in capital city decor quest givers that cost coin to do, but reward chests. This has not gone much farther than that.
Some really good suggestions. Really appreciate it.
I think the lottery coupled with the adjustments to moes is going to have a really good impact. Will have to see once its implemented, and if more coin sinks are needed, we can add for sure.

 

Perhaps some middle ground is needed. The now 3 tiers of difficulty get changed to 4 tiers:
Normal quests > Normal quests (Elite mode) > Leg quests > Leg quests (Elite mode)
or maybe a difficulty setting for leg quests gets added: Moderate > Hard > Impossible.

I don't think this is not yet needed. The current reality is that there's really only 2 tiers: Alliance quests > Leg quests. Elite quests are simply not worth the time reward wise as it currently stands. Fixing that would help a long way to bridge the gap.

 

I would be surprised if players revolted at a lottery but gladly accepted us adding gear that degrades over time or after a certain amount of times used.

We’ve always operated under the belief that once equipped, AoEO gear should be permanent.

 

I would like to see the lead devs comments on this. Frankly it seems like a couple people's side project, completely out of line with everything else done so far that has brought value to the game.
To me getting items in a fair way based on your effort is super important and I would never want to have some social experiment with the game's economy ruin that.

You would do well to hold some respect for the dev team, which you are supposed to be part of. The fact that the lottery was mentioned in the official developer blog should be more than clear enough about the lead developers' stance on the lottery.

Without having seen everything about the lottery and the all the small details, it's short-sighted and tunnel-vision-y to rush to such strong and harsh conclusions about its design and the intention behind making it.

There are many types of different players enjoying the game. People who enjoy the MMO aspect of the game (trading, crafting, etc.) are just as valuable as everyone else. Saying things like "The players that love moes thrill so much would be better off choosing another game." is a very blunt remark. You are in no position to determine how each person should be able to enjoy the game. The aspect of RNG/luck is in the very skeleton of the game, where you get your loot from random chests.

This isn't the first time such a mechanic is used in the game, and it will most certainly not be the last one.

Final word: wait until you hear everything about the lottery before you draw any conclusions, and preferably with a nicer tone than what I've been seeing in this thread so far.